Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North

18 Reparations

18 Reparations In time, of course, the British left. The war moved on and all the soldiers with it. That strange intrusion lurched away. For seven years and more, violence swept south and west, extracting its ungodly toll, burying tens of thousands. Then at last the war was done and Ten Hills Farm reclaimed its marshy silence. Despite the language of freedom embedded in the U.S. Constitution —We the people . . . in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice . . . promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity . . . —slavery did not end. In the South a deeply entrenched labor system firmly kept its hold, defying the lofty wording of the nation’s founders for many generations more. In General John Stark’s home state of New Hampshire, too, slavery remained legal, if almost nonexistent. No final order issued from the bench or from New Hampshire’s new state capital would command an end of human bondage there until the verge of Civil War. Beside the Massachusetts Bay, where Belinda still belonged to the absent Isaac Royall, the shift toward freedom for the slaves was gradual and initially quite vague. In Belinda’s case, it came not from a new government, but from her master, who with a stroke of his pen allowed her to choose freedom for the first time in her adult life. Other of his many slaves would not be so fortunate. In his will, the Benefactor passed those men and women on to other owners. REPARATIONS 229 By the time the guns stopped firing, Isaac Royall Jr. was dead. He had never managed to get home. Instead, he stayed in England and visited often with his daughter Mary Erving and her husband George, who had settled in the town of Froyle near the island’s southern coast. In 1781, while war still raged, the town was visited by smallpox, a disease that had terrified Isaac Royall Jr. all his life. Now it took him. On October 17 that year, just as General Charles Cornwallis prepared to surrender with his seven thousand troops at Yorktown, the Benefactor was buried beside a fourteenth-century church an ocean’s distance from the fighting. There, a weathered chest tomb set above his grave identifies this man—born on a slave plantation in Antigua, long-time master at Ten Hills Farm, a member of the Massachusetts Governor’s Council for twenty-two years, dandy, dilettante, father of two, owner of slaves, collector of art, and the founder of Harvard Law School— only as a native of Medford in New England, dead at the age of sixty-two. But terse as his memorial is, that mossy stone, carefully refurbished and set plumb in 2005 (and clearly identified on the church’s website), completes a circle of sorts. It rests just thirty miles from where John Winthrop sailed 150 years before. It was not the Benefactor’s wish to die in England. Instead, he dreamed of going home but hedged his bets by seeking money and support from Britain while he lived upon her shores. In 1777 he wrote a letter to Lord North in London requesting aid from the king’s coffers. What money he could gather was already spent, he informed the baby-faced prime minister, since he had fallen ill and used it for his doctors’ bills. But once he was a rich man. In America he’d had a farm worth £30,000 sterling, and men and women to serve his every need. Now he lived in exile, was nearly destitute and in ill health. He needed help. Oh that God might bless “his Majesty’s measures with success,” he prayed, that these misguided colonists would see their “true interest” and renew their sense of “duty to the Mother Country and to the best of Kings.” But could Lord North please use his considerable powers to grant him just a little cash meanwhile? To friends and acquaintances in New England, the Benefactor sang an altogether different tune. Alarmed by a rumor that traitors 230 CHAPTER 18 who returned without permission would “suffer Death without benefit of Clergy” (“I am informed,” he wrote with shock, “my Name is mentioned in the Act”), and disturbed by news the government had confiscated his beloved Medford estate, he scribbled hopeful pleas to influential men in Boston. Some among those letters survive and are held...